Bruce Dickinson has seen firsthand how the new streaming model financially straps up-and-coming acts. After all, the Iron Maiden frontman has two children, Austin and Griffin, who are aspiring musicians – and he thinks their generation is “being completely stuffed.”
“My two boys [are] both doing their own thing, and they both just got signed to record labels and stuff,” Dickinson told Opie Radio yesterday. “So they’re going through the whole process right now.”
There’s little support from the record companies, and services like Spotify and Apple Music don’t pay at the same rate as CD and vinyl editions do. Yet, there seems to be little anyone can do about this state of affairs, Dickinson notes, because the largest chunk of the listening public these days has shifted away from owning physical copies of music.“It’s just like one of those kind of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t moments, really,” Dickinson said. “Kids love music, and people love music now more than probably any other time in human history, right? So what do you do? Do you say that people that love everything, ‘You’re all criminals, just ’cause you love it’? That’s what sank all the record labels, who didn’t figure out that … these people are not trying to do harm. They just love it, you know?”
How this ultimately will impact the future is what concerns Dickinson. “What’s sad, I think, is for the young bands coming up,” he explained. “‘Cause, I mean, how are they gonna make a living? Because, basically, they are being completely stuffed by not so much illegal downloading – although, yeah, that kind of, obviously, goes on and all the rest of it. But the bar is now so low in terms of what value people place on people’s creativity and music and stuff like that, and it’s just getting driven down into the basement.”
Austin Dickinson’s band is called As Lions; Griffin’s is called Shvpes. Iron Maiden, meanwhile, are set to release The Book of Souls, the group’s first double album, on Sept. 4. Touring plans are on hold until 2016 while Dickinson continues to recover from a cancer scare.
